turkey – Sim Lev

There are seventeen sleeps to go until Pesach. I am genuinely excited.

You know, one of the things I love most about Pesach is the matza.

I enjoy clearing out all the leavened products from the house, dumping bags of pasta with the food bank, hiding the toaster in the garage, and eating only matza for a week.

It’s not that I like the taste. (Although it is good as a vehicle for my favourite food group: butter.)

In fact, I think it’s precisely the discipline that I enjoy. It is having a religiously-mandated prohibition built into my life, if only for a little while.

I am going to talk here about my own relationship with consumption, food, and restriction, but this will be very different for everyone. I know that, for some, ‘saying no’ to food can become a burden rather than a blessing, and that achieving a neutral relationship with food is its own spiritual discipline.

Judaism teaches us that if a fast or a restriction endangers our health—physical or mental—the commandment is actually to eat. Our goal is to be masters of our impulses, not enemies of our own survival.

So, in telling you what is meaningful to me, I am not trying to tell you how to live your life (I have no such right), but to tell you why the practice of clearing out chametz and eating only matza matters to me.

And, personally, I love the moments of spiritual discipline.

I think there is something in the human condition that means we want some help sublimating our desires. Every religion, throughout the world, places restrictions, either permanently or for short periods, on how people can consume.

We all want to know that we are not slaves to endless gluttony, but can serve something Higher than ourselves.

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of joining the Dialogue Society‘s iftar at Kingston Guildhall. This is a daily meal, served after sunset every day throughout the month of Ramadan.

Throughout the evening, we learned a number of facts about Ramadan and iftars. But as the evening went on, I reflected that I could never truly know what Ramadan was. I would never understand it as an insider; as one who fasts every day for a month; as one who considers this deprivation a pillar of faith.

The iftar was lovely, but the fast is what brings people to the meal. Through their fast, Muslims learn what it is to sympathise with the poor, to feel one with a global community, and to submit to their Creator’s will.

I was seated with the other clergy: the imams and vicars that KLS has enabled me to befriend. Reverend Joe shared that the Christians were also going through their own period of deprivation: the Fast of Lent. During these forty days, Christians give up the things that tempt them most. In Reverend Joe’s case, this was alcohol and chocolate.

As an outsider, I have seen the end product of Lent – its festival of Easter, filled with chocolate hunts, painted eggs and, once or twice, even a gory reenactment of Jesus’s crucifixion.

Easter looks fun, but I realise that what must make it so meaningful is the period of deprivation beforehand. Their experience of refusing temptation is designed to help them better understand Jesus’s suffering. Here, too, the spiritually important part is saying no to something else.

The idea of saying no to consumption feels so alien to our modern world. The second I want something, I can order it online and have it delivered a day later. If I like the sound of any food from anywhere in the world, I barely need to think before I’m eating it.

And, personally, I have a hard time saying no to just about anything. I struggle to eat just one biscuit or drink just one glass of wine. And, if there’s food on the table, I can be sure I’ll keep eating until there isn’t.

I shouldn’t be surprised by this.

I’ve been completely inundated with advertising and consumer culture since birth. When I’m bored, I can stare at my phone to shut off my brain and get more of the same.

Our old medieval superstitions have been replaced by the new religion of consumption. You can practise all of them at once: eat chocolate at Easter and turkey at Christmas; eat doughnuts at Chanukah and soup at Pesach.

And, of course, at every opportunity, we must buy; we must spend money. We must make sacrifices to the god of The Market who will slump and weep if we stop purchasing for even a moment. In the name of our new religion, we must swallow the whole world.

So, refusing consumption feels like something medieval and irrational.

But isn’t it precisely the foundation of Judaism?

The tenth commandment is לֹא־תַחְמֹד – thou shalt not covet. Do not desire. Do not lust. Do not gaze greedily at everything around you from your friend’s partners to your neighbour’s animals. Do not envy.

This is the basis of all the other commandments. If we don’t want what others have, why would we ever steal? If we don’t lust after anybody else, why would we ever betray our partners? If we don’t want anything but what we have, why would we ever go chasing after other gods?

But wanting is not like stealing or cheating. Wanting is a primal urge.

How can I be expected to have no desires at all for what is beautiful? This rule is telling me to suppress my own feelings; that just the very fact of wanting anything is a sin. That feels cruel and punitive.

We’re not the first to feel this way. Generations of Jews have grappled with exactly this problem.

There is a lovely midrash from thousands of years ago on this topic, that says, it’s not that we’re supposed to say we have no desires for things we can’t have. Instead, we should say “actually I do want all these things, but God in Heaven has decreed against it.”

Some part of me does want to consume everything; to own everything; to control everything. I need to know that this is within me. And then I need to remember that I am more than a gluttonous animal. I have the ability to exercise restraint.

The medieval commentator, ibn Ezra, taught that this is deeper than just self-deprivation. By saying no to our desires, we say yes to our God. We say yes to trust and faith. We see the world’s beauty as even more beautiful precisely because we know it is forbidden to us.

The French-Algerian philosopher, Albert Camus, wrote that saying no is the foundation of all human values. “I refuse, therefore I exist.” What we are willing to say no to determines who we are.

The Israelites were not truly God’s people until they refused to be Pharaoh’s slaves. Our ancestors said no to subjugation; no to tyranny; no to being someone else’s property; no being held back by the false gods of greed and idolatry.

With one no, they could say many yeses. Yes to the God of all Creation. Yes to being commanded by a greater power. Yes to the festivals and yes to the holy days. Yes to the humble pursuit of God’s will. Yes to peace, equality, dignity, and freedom.

And that is what the matza symbolises to me today.

It is more than a cracker. It is a statement about what I am willing to say no to.

I say no to leaven, and therefore no to a system that demands I consume everything until there is nothing left of the world.

I say yes to matza, and therefore yes to pursuing justice, living with simplicity, and walking in God’s ways.

As we come to this Pesach, consider what you can do to exercise spiritual discipline. My practice is to cut out leavened food, but you may find your own.

Can you clear out your cupboards, and give excess clothes to charity? Can you look at your spending, and set a bigger portion aside for those in need? Can you put a restriction on your phone usage?

What is the chametz, the leaven, that is weighing you down in your life? And how will you make the conscious choice to say no to it?

I refuse, therefore I am.

We say no, so we are.

Shabbat shalom.

Hello, I am back from my holidays in Spain and France. I brought you all back some lovely little trinkets from The Louvre. Just don’t tell anybody you got them from me.

I spent my holiday thinking about how easy it is for me to travel, and how impressive my journey would seem to previous generations. I wondered about what it was like in earlier centuries for people travelling the world.

In 1532, a great king travelled across the Atlantic to meet a previously unencountered tribe. The king was, in some ways, disgusted by the society he encountered, which was rife with inequality, governed by a despotic ruler, near constantly in a state of war, and yet to develop serious hygiene practice.

He was, however, impressed by the luxuries he saw in the local king’s palace, and intrigued by the sophisticated religious culture the people had developed.

The indigenous people went by many names, but the locals called themselves “the English.”

That’s right, in the early 16th Century, an Aimoré king travelled across the Atlantic from Brazil to the court of King Henry VIII and attended the palace as a distinguished guest.

We are used to thinking of international travel in the Tudor Age as something that voyagers from England, Portugal, Italy and Spain did to the so-called “New World,” but plenty of people also went the other way.

Recently, the historian Caroline Dodds Pennock released a book called On Savage Shores, which looks at the people who travelled from the Americas to Europe. They gave their own verdicts on European society, often quite damning of its inequality and sanitation.

Dodds Pennock is well aware that, by telling these stories, she is reversing the gaze. To the indigenous travellers, it was the Europeans who were the strange exotic outsiders.

If this feels surprising to us, it is probably because we are so in the habit of imagining that rich colonising men go out and see the world, but we don’t often think of those same men getting looked at by the world.

There is a reason that Abraham’s story of setting out from Haran was so compelling to its ancient listeners. Most people did not travel more than a mile from their own town. The world beyond was a mysterious and exciting place. They could only hear about the journeys, people, animals, and plants that others saw from testimonies, like those given in the Torah.

Abraham’s trek belongs, then, in a similar category of travel literature to Homer’s Odyssey, which was likely told as an oral story, and then committed to writing at a similar time to Abraham’s journey in the Torah. Odysseus encounters singing sirens, multi-headed monsters, and lotuses that make you forget your home.

Abraham, on the other hand, goes on a thousand-mile hike with no less than the One True God. Along the way, he marries a foreign princess, meets the king of Egypt, does battle in the Dead Sea with local lords, and meets angelic messengers over a meal.

This story must have remained compelling to many generations of Jews afterwards. Medieval Jews were used to living in one place. They may have been visited by merchants and Crusaders. Some may have gone away on fixed routes as merchants, and there were times when whole communities had to leave in haste.

But the idea that one of their own – the first ever Jew – went out on such an exciting adventure would have been thrilling to the Torah’s audience.

We know much of what other people thought of the Jews they met. Medieval accounts describe Jews almost as a people fixed in time; like a noble relic from a simpler age. The European travellers who encounter Jews treat them with a combination of scorn and exotic interest. In that sense, the Jews of Europe had more in common with the colonised people of the Americas, who were similarly treated as foreign oddities.

Bucking the trend, however, was a fascinating figure of the 12th Century, called Benjamin of Tudela. Born in the Spanish kingdom of Navarre, Benjamin went out on a journey tracing the Jewish communities of southern Europe, northern Africa, and south west Asia.

He took a long route on pilgrimage to Jerusalem that brought him through countries we would know today as Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. He seems also to have travelled around the Arabian peninsula, looking for the Jews of Africa, but never reaching the Gondar region of Ethiopia, where he might have found them.

Benjamin recorded all of his encounters in Hebrew, in a book called Sefer HaMasa’ot, the Book of Travels. His chronicles were so fascinating that they were reproduced over many centuries, and translated into Latin and most European languages.

Today, Benjamin’s records have attracted scholarly attention, not least because they subvert our expectations of who goes exploring and who gets explored. Benjamin writes with fascination and joy about the Pope in Rome and the Caliph in Baghdad.

Most importantly, when Benjamin meets Jews in other countries, he is at once meeting his own people and meeting people entirely different from himself. When he sees how other Jews do things differently, he feels joy in diversity. When he sees Jews doing well, he feels pride; and when he sees other Jews in a persecuted condition, he suffers with them as his own.

This is the great blessing of Benjamin’s travelogue: he can see the world through two sets of eyes – as both an outsider and as an insider. When he travels, he is never quite the colonialist going out to comment on others, but he’s never just looking at his own people. This gives him an impressive position of humble curiosity.

As British Jews, we may learn to do the same thing.

We have a blessing by dint of our position. That blessing is a special ability to look at the world through multiple sets of eyes.

We can, indeed, look at the world through European eyes. We are Europeans, and we belong here. We can see England as it is imagined by the English, where this island is the centre of the world, its monarchs the most illustrious, its culture the highest human attainment. We should not shy away from seeing the best in Europe: we are part of it, and there is much to love.

We can also, if we choose too, see this continent through outsiders’ eyes. We can see its flaws, its delusions of grandeur, and its odd habits. We can be the best possible internal critics of our country, because we understand what it is to belong, and what it is to feel like we do not.

The danger in either of these sets of eyes is that we turn them into a haughty gaze. Like the early colonialists, we have the capacity to see every other culture as backward and barbaric, or its people and lands as subjects for exploitation. Inverting the gaze, we might come to see the Europeans as horrible invaders, without directing the critical lens on ourselves.

But if, instead, we can approach the whole world with modesty, we can see every nation and every place with loving curiosity. With humility, we can see ourselves as fellow travellers with everyone else, discovering this wonderful world together.

If we can do this, then, like Abraham, we may truly learn to walk with God.

Tag: turkey

I refuse, therefore I am

Who gets to see the world?